YOUR KINDNESS AND GRACE
30/04/24 12:55
The proper treatment of women in family, society, parliament and in the workplace will come when men are better people, when they have better hearts and when their inner man is devoted to the betterment of others rather than predation. While education can do it’s best the externalities of manipulation and control are not the answer to men’s habit of killing wives, girlfriends, and the Earth.
FUTILE ATTEMPTS
Most of the attempts to improve social life in the polity are entirely external. Much of their thrust is contained in attempted education, frequent sloganeering, political manipulation and public coercion. Social Media is a hotbed of shaming and gaslighting. This is the humanist way. It’s the dead-way of the knowledge of good and evil and the culture of un-love.
The counterpart in Christian circles is an attachment to the law, an immersion in legalism and the touting of externalities as if they are the gospel. There is no condemnation in Christ Jesus. But there is a perverted Christianity as a moralistic ideology. Legalism uncovered itself in the killing of Christ. Christ revealed God in dying so the world could live.
EXTERNALITIES
Externalities have a limited effect on human and social transformation. Christ our life generates the New Creation. He forgives us, stands in for us and makes us new people by living His life in us. Thus, in the Spirit we become an expression of Christ.
IT’S BEING
Our legacy in Jesus is less what you do and more who you are. If we are sons, we can expect to multiply the life of the son of God. If we are workers and slaves of the kind Paul mentions in Galatians, we will enslave ourselves in religion and bind others –in the name of God.
NOT ABOUT US
The Jewish leaders wanted to enlist Jesus in the cause of the restoration of Israel’s greatness – just like some of us today are devoted to pumping up our own denomination in the name of Jesus. Holy Spirit and the gifts will never be used for the benefit of partisan gospels. Holy Spirit can lead those in a divergent gospel to fullness in Christ but will never be hostage to gospels that are an aberration of the real.
PURE EQUALS BLESSED
We need to be among the pure in heart to see God, to know His Gospel and be fluent in the apostle’s teaching. A divided loyalty will not deliver clarity of thought. The impure in motive will not reveal God as God is, as the Son is and as we can be in His Gospel. The pure in heart see God. The divided in heart have poor spiritual discernment. They see not very much at all and present a botched christianity.
OFF THE HIRDY-GIRDY
We can avoid the merry-go-round of seeming success followed by stagnation and depletion in church life. If we are to join with Christ in the expansion of His life there must come a time when we choose to adopt His Gospel in place of our own gospel.
Jesus is not about legitimising or empowering our institutions and communities. He is in the business of re-creation and new creation. Everything that is alive is an expression of Him. Everything that is not Him or a dilution of Christ and His Gospel will stagnate and die. When He is the Vine we are the branches laden with the fruits of life. We become life-imparters because we are life in Christ who is our life. We multiply His love that works in us.
NOT A SURFACE WORK
“Jesus did not come .. to reorganise the human, social and political structures on the surface of Israel's life, which could not touch the forces of evil underlying them but only provide them with a new disposition of structures to use for their own ends …
He came, rather, to penetrate into the innermost existence of Israel in such a way as to gather up its religious and historical dialogue with God into himself, to make its partnership and its conflict with God his own, precisely as they moved to their climax with the Incarnation, and thus in and through Israel to strike at the very root of evil in the enmity of the human heart to God.
He came to grapple with evil, therefore, at the very point where under the unrelenting pressure of the self-giving presence and love of God to mankind it was forced to uncover itself in the crucifixion of the incarnate Son of God, and then to deal with it decisively in atoning sacrifice.” (1)
CONFUSED GUIDES
Religion will eventually kill God and suffocate the life of God in those who could have become Godly had they not been led astray by blind leaders. Thus, there is a responsibility on those who are not leaders to distinguish between those who have a following and those who are ministers of the new covenant.
God can draw us out of dullness and blindness if we have half an eye open. The genius of God utilised the perfidy and debasement of man and his opposition to life to end the separation of the human race from oneness with God. This was achieved in the murder of God at the cross. We and all people are made one - in Christ’s accomplishment of joining us to God in Himself.
THIS BODY OF DEATH
But many of the Jews would not accept it – would not accept that Jesus has made the two one in His own body and person. This is what Paul means when he states that those who ignore the Christ and retain themselves in the law have made themselves part of this body of death – which resists life and kills Christ. Because at heart it is anti-life and anti-Christ.
The orcs in The Lord of the Rings are a startling representation of the real nature of those who live from self-effort (the rings that binds them) instead of Christ their life.
THIS BODY OF LIFE
To be part of the Body of Christ is to live from the incarnation. To live from the incarnation is to acknowledge that Jesus has come in our flesh. To live from the law or a mixture of law and Christ is to deny the foundational truth of the Kingdom of Christ. The law come in the flesh is not Christ come in the flesh. It is the flesh come in the flesh – the opposite to life in the Spirit.
The law has been replaced by the incarnation which is Christ come in our flesh. An obsession with the law is not righteousness or life but a continuation of the lie that extends the fall beyond the time. As John says, ‘Many deceivers, who do not acknowledge Jesus Christ as coming in the flesh, have gone out into the world. Any such person is the deceiver and the antichrist’ 2 John 1.7 NIV.
(1) Myk Habets, Theosis in the Theology of Thomas Torrance
